Many so-called SEOs will try to sell you what is known as high DA and DR backlinks. DA stands for Domain Authority, and DR stands for Domain Rating. These scores, created by companies such as Moz and Ahrefs, estimate how likely a website is to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) compared with its competitors.

None of these scores is a direct ranking factor with Google or other search engines, and they are merely vanity metrics used as a benchmark for assessing a website’s performance based on internal characteristics only.

These ratings can easily be manipulated through a multitude of techniques and may appear to help you rank initially, but the gains will likely fall once Google detects a link farm or parasite SEO has been used to artificially inflate rankings. This can ultimately result in losing all of your ranking increases if the algorithm detects that this is happening.

Parasite SEO is the practice of placing links to a domain on a website that allows comments or interactions from members of the public. If webmasters haven’t configured websites correctly, then these can be abused in order to pass authority from the backlink, helping to rank the recipient site in the search engine.

The anchor tag, also known as the text of a link pointing to a domain, helps signal to Google what the content is about.

Often, this is continually used as an exact match on parasite domains, which helps rank certain keywords quickly, but is xeroed by Google once they detect that the linking domain (link from their domain to yours) is linking to hundreds, if not thousands, of domains via comments, page links, and other parasitic tactics.